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Announcement: MABS August 2014 Update is now live!

We are pleased to announce the August 2014 update of Microsoft Azure BizTalk Services and the associated SDK.

The release provides ability to configure and manage agreements and bridges separately, new features for EDI, enhanced encryption for AS2, supports advanced XML schema constructs in transforms and is Drummond certified.

While these features are immediately available in any new BizTalk services you create, existing services will be upgraded over in next few days. There would be no impact to availability of existing services as we roll out the upgrade. There are no pricing changes with this announcement.

Key features you can now leverage with this release are:

Ability to Configure and Manage Agreements and Bridge Separately

You can now change settings in a bridge (transforms, transport settings …) without having to redeploy the corresponding agreement. Additionally one bridge can now cater to multiple agreements. Agreements and bridges can be configured and managed separately enabling reuse of configurations and ease of management.

Note: all your existing agreements and bridges continue to function as before. This feature update decouples existing agreements and its associated bridges but does not break functionality in any way

EDI Delimiters at a Transaction Set Level

When sending messages to a B2B partner via an agreement you could use only one pair of delimiters for that partner. With this release Azure BizTalk Services allows configuration of delimiter set per message type on the outbound side. This is applicable for both X12 and EDIFACT protocols. Acknowledgements generated during receive side processing can also choose to use the delimiter set of the incoming message for which they were generated.

Enhanced digest and encryption algorithms for AS2

Supported symmetric key encryptions:

Existing: RC2, 3DES

New: AES-128, AES-192, and AES-256

Supported algorithms for MIC calculation:

Existing: MD5, SHA1

New: SHA2-256, SHA2-384, and SHA2-512

AS2 Drummond Certified

We are happy to announce that with this release Azure BizTalk Services is now AS2 Drummond Certified. See the same being announced by the Drummond Group here and here.

Support for Advanced XML Schema Constructs

All advanced XML schema constructs used in complex schemes, including derived types (xs:extension and xs:restriction types), are now fully supported in Transforms. These derived types are typically used in OAGIS, Salesforce and GJXDM schemas. When you create links from elements under a “derived type” node in the Source schema, that link is only executed when the “xsi:type” value in the input XML instance matches the type value for that specific node. For “derived type” node in the Target schema, the correct “xsi:type” is stamped automatically in the output XML instance based on the incoming mapping links.

Following is the list of the XML schema constructs that are newly supported.

Derived complex types – i.e., <xs:extension> and <xs:restriction> being used for a complex-type definition (with a complex type as its base type)